Systems and methods herein generally relate to printers that use replaceable printing modules and more particularly to that controlling the use of the optional colors in extended gamut printing based on the pixels in the gamut extension.
In order to print using colors other than the printer's permanent colors that are used for all print jobs, or the vast majority of print jobs (e.g., colors other than red, green, blue (RGB) in a RGB printer; other than cyan, yellow, magenta, black (CMYK) in a CMYK printer, such as orange, green, blue, etc.), some printers include an additional housing (sometimes referred to as the fifth color housing, or Xth housing if more than 5 are enabled) that holds replaceable printing modules (sometimes referred to as a customer replaceable unit (CCU), fifth color module, spot color module, or imaging media cartridges) that are separate from the permanent color printing modules. This allows switching of the replaceable printing modules seamlessly in minutes; however, the fifth colorants (spot colors) are more expensive and used less frequently than the printer's permanent colors.
When job programming an extended gamut job, two destination profiles are applied to the job. One is for printing to the extended gamut (e.g., CMYK+Orange), and the other is for printing to the base gamut (CMYK). Users can use page exception programming to define the use of two different colorant combinations (e.g., CMYK and CMYK+Orange) on a page-by-page basis. However, users may not know what content resides on particular pages, and what pages would benefit from the use of the more expensive optional fifth colorant.
Extended gamut colorant destination profiles are designed to use the extended colorant in regions of color space that cannot be rendered accurately by the main colors alone. The reason why the extended gamut colorant is used in these regions is to facilitate smooth sweeps that progress across the gamut boundary of main color output to the region(s) requiring the extended gamut colorant for accurate color representation. Since the expensive extended gamut colorant will be used in color regions covered by the main colors, it is desirable not to use the extended gamut colorant if it provides no color gamut advantage verses the main colors alone.